Is Russell Brand to blame for climate change?

The climate march went ahead. The Guardian devoted their whole front cover to the issue. Russell Brand spake from the platform. But you have to ask yourself – given the stakes – why the climate change campaign seems so Sisyphean (I don't know if there is such a word: I mean like pushing stones uphill).

It shouldn't be so difficult, after all. Why wouldn't people subscribe to the idea of rescuing human life on earth? Or saving themselves ruinous costs? And yet they resist it very effectively, with increasing tenacity.

And here, as so often, Jonathan Freedland hit the nail squarely on the head..  Look at the speakers at the climate march on Saturday: Russell Brand and the usual, predictable suspects.

The answer he suggests is that it is because the climate campaigners have explicitly limited themselves to a campaign from the left. They have embraced the vocabulary and symbolism of the left. No campaign so fundamental, asking such fundamental changes of people and government, is going to succeed unless it can also attract the right.

As Jonathan says, the first speech on the subject was made by Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. It shouldn’t be impossible to imagine a conservative climate campaign in parallel and integrated to what we have now.

The Green Party is booming at the moment, but I can't help feeling they are making a similar mistake, They have embraced the language of the left, presumably to pick up disaffected Lib Dem and Labour votes – which would have come to them anyway – but, by doing so, have put a glass ceiling in the way of their growth as a movement.

These issues are too fundamental to campaign from one side of the political divide alone.  By doing so, we render our campaign ineffective - and we don't have that luxury.

This is not intended as a criticism of the left, or of the right come to that, but to say something about how causes as urgent as the climate campaign achieve their objectives. It is by building alliances, not by focusing the appeal.

But there is another problem which Jonathan Freedland never mentions. By couching the climate campaign purely in terms of the left, it has become associated with the same problem that has beset the left over the past generation – it becomes defensive, melancholic, backward-looking and nostalgic for the past.  It becomes irritatingly puritanical and disapproving.

That has been the left's besetting sin since they were swept aside in the 1980s, and it is one reason they have failed to claw back a coherent, mainstream political solution.

If the climate campaign is going to succeed, as my friend Joe Zammit-Lucia keeps arguing, it will need to persuade people – not so much that the earth is doomed – but that their lives can be better, richer, wealthier and more fulfilled by embracing the radical changes that are necessary.

The campaign needs to demonstrate that renewable energy is the key to independence and prosperity. It needs to paint a picture that solves problems rather than tiptoeing away from them back into a an embittered identification of those to blame.

What I find so frustrating is the incredulity that climate change campaigners (like me) feel that their message is so difficult to put across – the demonisation of the other side – when the tools for winning are within their grasp.

Why don't they grasp them? Because they have to win on their own terms? That they have to win by being melancholic or spreading blame? Because to win in other ways looks like cheating? Or, worse, it sounds conservative?

Yet the longer it takes to make this shift, the more difficult it will be to get people who are shiftable out of their entrenched positions.  In fact, they are risking failure on this vital issue by their failing to break out of the conventional political divide - as if, to do so, would commit a greater sin than losing the whole world to global warming.

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Not small enough? Just how inefficient our economy is

I’ve been interviewing economists and radicals for the last six months about the conundrum of local economics, and why they don’t see eye to eye on it – given that they want the same thing (more prosperity).

The result has been my co-written book People Powered Prosperity.

One of the things I realised while I researched it is that, actually, the word ‘local’ is neither very accurate nor very useful.

It is inaccurate because the real problem isn’t so much the lack of local financial and enterprise institutions (though that is a problem too), but how to scale them up without losing the access to local information and relationships which makes them so effective.

The answer is to network them together to a new mezzo level, between local and national, but making sure that their control remains local.

It is misleading because the word ‘local’ screams to conventional economists the implication ‘protectionism’. It appears to be about borders. They worry about wholly irrelevant issues – the kind that obsess the official mind – like defining ‘local’.

No, the kind of ultra-local economic revitalisation I’m interested is designed to encourage more competition, not less. More choice, not less. It is about small-scale before it is about local.

One of the interviews I carried out was with the American pioneer of local economics Michael Shuman, and it was he who encouraged me to make the extent of the market failure visible – because it is precisely that that big banks and mainstream policy-makers deny.

He suggested I look up the comparative value-added figures for the UK for big business and SMEs.

Sure enough, the OECD tables are pretty clear. SMEs earn 51 per cent of the profit in the UK. A properly functioning economy would therefore be funnelling about half the investment in their direction.

In fact, only 11 per cent of big bank investment is going to SMEs according to BIS.

You might reasonably answer that small businesses don’t need the same kind of investment. This is true, but they do need something – even if it is just mentoring – which the mainstream financial world manifestly assumes it will somehow provide for itself.

Look at national resources and see where they are concentrated. We continue to rely on half the value in the economy coming from small business, but do nothing about it.

There is the extent of the market failure that the current system is so blind to.

The solution? Provide the UK with the kind of local financial institutions most other nations have. Don’t take the enterprising innovators for granted.

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Revitalising cities means escaping from acronym hell

I am now in my fifties - a bit of a shock and I still haven't got over it yet - and I have discovered over the past few years that one political objective above all others has gripped me.

I'm not saying it's the only thing that matters - just that it is what I want to do now.  I want to find ways that the mainstream and the radical thinkers and practitioners can learn from each other.

There is nothing so frustrating in UK public life - and in economics particularly - that decades go by in mutual incomprehension before new ideas can be dragged kicking and screaming into mainstream policy.  I am tempted to say, only when they are worn out.

So the seminar I organised at the Treasury yesterday, to discuss the findings of my book People Powered Prosperity, was a step along that long and rather frustrating road.  It was chaired by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury - and Danny Alexander has a creative and heroic ability to ask the mainstream difficult questions and to keep on asking them.

It also managed to get in the room, not just the civil servants running the cities and local growths team, but a representative bunch of the local bankers, local energy pioneers, local procurement advocates, local currency thinkers who are pushing forward the boundaries of what might be possible.

So far so good, but I realised by the end that the task has only just begun.  It was inspiring to hear people like Ben Lucas of the Cities Growth Commission and Edward Twiddy of the new Atombank - and former Newcastle leader John Shipley - using language which straddled the two worlds.

There is a new understanding emerging, it seems to me, that the levers for revitalising local economies will be local - and that we have suffered from the illusion that national institutions can ever be effective at a job that requires specialist local knowledge.

The next stage is, I think, to form some kind of semi-official local economics sounding board inside the Treasury and Cabinet Office so that the new ideas and techniques can permeate quickly.

That's what I want to do next.

But I was reminded of the huge gap that still remains.  At the end of the seminar, I talked to one of the most effective of the radicals, from the Transition Towns movement, and asked her why she had been so quiet.

"Because I was so horrified," she said.

I could see immediately what she meant.  One of the problems about getting economic policy-makers in a room together is that you sink immediately into acronym hell.

And the acronyms do tend to get in the way of the core reality - which, as she reminded me, is this.

There is a huge energy in the poorest places which remains untapped, untouched by financial or business institutions.  It is an entrepreneurial energy which is the future driver of change and innovation - if we can find institutions of the right shape and responsiveness to shape it into real wealth.

That is the extent of the failure in the past and the extent of the hope.  If we can do it.  But we tend to sink back into acronym hell all too easily and forget it.

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Jerusalem and the West Lothian anthem question

I see that Laura Wright, the soprano who plays rugby for Rosslyn Park and also the singer of the official rugby anthem, has urged whoever takes these decisions to use Jerusalem as the anthem for England in this year’s rugby World Cup (for some reason the Standard story yesterday is not online).

She says the English need something to compete with Flower of Scotland and Land of My Fathers for inspiration.  That isn’t to say that God Save the Queen isn’t inspiring.  The point is – and Laura wasn’t so political – is that it is the anthem of the nation as a whole.  It seems tactless, to say the least, to use it to inspire the English team when it is playing Scotland or Wales.

It is the cultural equivalent of the West Lothian Question and it won’t go away.

Personally, I think this is inevitable eventually.  I’m sorry that, as usual, sheer conservatism is preventing some kind of decision.

I also think Jerusalem is the perfect anthem for the English nation because of its complex spiritual message – not just from Blake, but all those other people involved in its development from the poet Robert Bridges and the composer Hubert Parry to the great explorer and campaigner Francis Younghusband.

It seems to me that a really effective, inspiring anthem must point beyond either bombast or banality, to something with depth and authenticity - and something way beyond the everyday.  Jerusalem does that.

You can read the whole strange story of the words and music in my ebook Jerusalem: England’s National Anthem. 

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Miliband's unexpcted favour to the Lib Dems

The personal finance expert Martin Lewis has come out against Labour's plan to cut student fees to £6,000 a year.  He says it is is subsidy to future bankers, as he explains:

"The only people who would gain from it are those who would clear their entire loan for tuition fees plus any loans for living costs, plus the interest, within the 30 years. To do this you’d need to be a high earner.

"To see the exact amount, go to my student finance calculator and play about with different scenarios – watching the impact of reducing tuition fees. It shows that only those with a STARTING SALARY of at least £35,000 – and then rising by above inflation each year after – would pay less if you cut tuition fees (we have assumed the student also takes out £5,555 in maintenance loans per year).

"That’s a very high amount, mainly only City law firms, accountancy firms and investment banks pay that much as starting salaries. Is that really who Labour wants to target with this plan? Worse still, by cutting tuition fees it will reduce the bursaries that universities can give to attract poor students."

He is quite right about this.  It also shifts resources from existing students to future, well-paid graduates.

Because the truth about the - originally controversial - new system of university finance and students loans, that Vince Cable brought in, is that it bears few similarities to Labour's student loan system that it replaced.  It is only paid off when graduates can afford it, and those thresholds are very much higher now than they were.  It safeguards the low-paid theology graduates (I speak as one), but still provides them with the resources to study.

It provides proper funding for universities and it has underpinned a new life for universities, where a higher number of poorer students have been applying to go to university than ever before.

In fact, if Vince Cable had been a trickier customer - or longer in the job - he might have reasonably been able to claim that he had in fact abolished the old student loan system, as promised, and brought in a graduate tax with major safeguards for people who don't earn higher salaries.

Cable was too honest for that kind of Blairite spin.  But there is still a powerful case to be made for the new system, which is very much better and more generous than the old system.

In fact, it seems to me that Ed Miliband has done the Lib Dems an unexpected favour.  If he had not come up with this proposal, then the Lib Dems would have tiptoed through the general election whenever student loans were mentioned.  They would have been constantly on the back foot.

Now they are being forced to defend the current system, and therefore defend their record.  Since the current system is so much fairer than the old one, and they have a good case - this seems to me to be a heaven-sent opportunity.

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Making the opposite mistake to Natalie Bennett

I've just been listening to Natalie Bennett's car crash interview and rather wish I hadn't.  It reminded me uncomfortably of some of the radio interviews I've done myself over the years.  I don't think very well on my feet - one of the reasons I write this blog instead of talking too much.  I write too much instead.

But I've been wondering afterwards what her mistake was, precisely.  As leader of a party with one MP, she doesn't need to use the meaningless language of Westminster discourse.  There was no need to put a figure on the number of homes they would build.

The spurious number of 500,000 new homes was mentioned, and it is worth saying that - even during the Macmillan and Wilson years of jerry-built high rise flats, the UK never managed more than 400,000 a year.

Conventional political wisdom says that you have to express these things in terms of numbers and costs or nobody believes you, but is that really the case?  The figure of 500,000 a year is too round a number to be believable, too imprecise to be serious.  And either the basic policy work had not been done, or Natalie Bennett had forgotten the details.

I was irresistably reminded of the fatal moment when Charles Kennedy revealed a less than complete mastery of the details of the Lib Dem proposals for a local income tax during the 2005 general election.  His wife had just given birth, so perhaps it was understandable - but it was a critical moment too.  I expect this will be a critical one for the Greens.

But before Lib Dems get too holier-than-thou about it, it is worth remembering that they are making precisely the opposite mistake to the Greens.

The Greens have not worked through the practicalities of their proposals in sufficient detail.  They are not focused enough on immediate policy, but they have sharpened their ideology and everyone knows what they are for.

The Lib Dems are hugely exercised with the short-term strategies of getting policy details through Whitehall and the coalition.  Their whole attention is on making things happen, but have forgotten - hopefully temporarily - that they exist for a purpose beyond the moderation of Conservative and Labour excess.

If they forget sometimes what they are actually crusading for - the fundamental purpose of the party and its ideology - the Greens never do.  So don't let's be smug about Natalie Bennett's embarrassment.  She is at least beginning to think about the practicalities of radical policy-making.

I want the Lib Dems to do well this year as much, if not more, than anybody.  Nobody could accuse them of stinting on the policy front.  There will be powerful green policies in the Lib Dem manifesto.  But the more I can persuade the party to provide that crusading edge - to remember what their long-term purpose is - the more I can improve their chances.

Starting perhaps with recommending my own attempt at radical practicalities in my new book (written with Tony Greenham) on the practicalities of ultra-local economic regeneration.

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Military weakness is not as dangerous as military delusion

I joined the Liberal Party in 1979, as a student journalist, having interviewed all the local parliamentary candidates. Dermot Roaf, then the Liberal candidate for Oxford City, spent well over an hour with me in the middle of the day, when he must have had more urgent people to deal with – and, by the end, I was convinced. I went off then and there and paid my subscription.

But one of the reasons why I embraced the cause so enthusiastically – rather too enthusiastically for my own good – was my growing sense of irritation at the political discourse.

Why was it that the people who had particular ideologies bred into them seemed to cling to these bundles of ideas, some of which seemed contradictory – apparently because they were psychologically pre-disposed to do so?

Why was it, for example, that Conservatives tended to oppose public spending – but not, apparently, when it came to defence? Why was it that Labour supporters seemed to back all kinds of extra spending – but not, again apparently, when it came to defence?

It was all very odd, and I wondered this morning when I heard the news about sending troops to the Ukraine – can Cameron do that without a vote in the Commons? – whether the same contradictions applied.

I am clearly different these days. I recognise a tyrant when I see one, and Putin is one. There are clearly risks to the Baltic states, and it would be a setback for civilisation if they fell back under Russian control. Perhaps as much as Nazi control was of Poland.

What I do find indefensible is the way that successive governments, but the Blair government in particular, approached these issues with their preference for symbolic gestures to real action. It meant that, briefly at least, they could cut defence spending and still invade Afghanistan. And Iraq.

In the long run, it meant the humiliation of UK forces, and the undermining of our reputation for military competence – because our forces were not equipped or trained or prepared or numerous enough for the role they were supposed to be playing.

Is this what Cameron is doing? Sending 75 troops to Ukraine because it is a cheap gesture? Or is it the same kind of gesture as the one that Spanish government used during the first Gulf War: they would send forces to support the coalition, but on condition that they would leave if there was any fighting?

Because this kind of symbolism is far more dangerous that doing nothing. Sabre rattling might have its place, but if you sabre rattle when you have long since sold off your sabre, then you can get into difficulties – which the rest of us will have to pay for.

Am I advocating strong defence? Not necessarily. But the current mismatch between political rhetoric and military swagger, and the actual military resources we have at our disposal, is so stark that it is downright dishonest.

Something has to give. We are heading next month to the centenary of the Dardanelles expedition (March 18: the first attempt to force the narrows by sea), and it is a good moment to remember the psychology of military incompetence.

The commanders in 1915 deluded themselves about the enemy they faced, putting out reassuring orders to the officers explaining that Turkish troops were afraid of the dark. The result was inevitable.

It isn’t necessarily weakness that precedes military disasters. It is delusion, and this generation of politicians may be even more subject to delusions than any before them.

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